The project “re:verse – Towards a poetics of graphic design in the digital everyday” is contextualized as a critique of the contemporary – rational, simple, standardized, universal – landscape of web design and as an opening of possibilities of alternative aesthetics and behaviors.

Inspired in the concept of opacity of the poetic text (as opposed to the transparency of the rational text) and exploring ideas such as strangeness, complexity and contradiction, the project is organized from a mother-page, that presents a manifesto on the subject and groups a series of 15 practical experiments (webpage-poems). The webpages are categorized in two groups by theme: news-poems (reactions and reinterpretations of news shared online) and vernacular-poems (reappropriation and comentary on internet clichés). That meant the inclusion of content varying from terrorist attacks and politics to the selfie culture and pets.

Every webpage-poem was a personal interpretation of the theme in question and, through their visuals and operability, aimed to communicate on an emotional, visceral level. In visual terms, many of the pages are hard to read and, as an antithesis of what is conventional in graphic design for the web nowadays, attempt to purposely be particular, ambiguous, irrational, absurd or ironic. In operational terms, every experiment utilizes, on a bigger or smaller degree, time and movement (animations and transitions) in their composition. That means that, in the interaction with the pieces, the reader also becomes writer and designer, finishing the poem's composition while they read it.

Thesis project created in the Graphic Design MFA program at CalArts, between 2015 and 2016.